Okay okay okay. Much like the “Trivia Tuesday” features started out as “Trivia Saturday” fillers for weekend NaBloPoMo posts, everybody seemed to like “Unspooky Saturday” enough to make it an occasional year-round feature. Suggestions for ghost stories to dissect are welcomed.

My vague recollection of this story involves a man as the protagonist, but most of the search results seem to favor the girls-at-a-slumber-party angle, so I’m going with that. (And the core of the story was also the plot for a Western-themed episode of the Twilight Zone starring Lee Marvin, but my vague recollections involve neither the Old West nor Lee Marvin so I don’t think that’s where I got the idea.) Anyway.

—————

okay so a bunch of teenage girls are having a slumber party
and telling ghost stories
and someone tells a legend
about a guy buried in a local cemetery
who apparently really doesn’t like to be disturbed
because if you stand on his grave at midnight
he will reach up through the ground and grab you

which definitely takes
hey you kids get off of my lawn
to entirely new heights

and one of the girls is all citation needed bitchezzz
and the other girls are all how dare you question our entirely unsubstantiated beliefs
and tease her until she agrees to prove that the legend is false
by going and standing on the grave at midnight
how this didn’t become an after-school special about the dangers of peer pressure I’ll never know

so the girls all troop out of the house
and down to the graveyard
in their pajamas
in the middle of the night
leaving their parents wide open for a gross negligence lawsuit
and give the skeptical girl a knife

the plan is that she will stick the knife in the grave
to prove that she was there
instead of maybe just writing on the tombstone with a sharpie
and also where did a bunch of teenage girls in their pajamas get a knife

but anyway

the girl finds her way to the grave
and sticks the knife in the ground
and starts to walk away
but she can’t because something is holding the hem of her nightgown
so she immediately decides that the most plausible explanation
is that the legend is true and the dead guy has reached up and grabbed her nightgown
and why is it that the dead are always so malevolent in these kinds of stories
with the grabbing and dragging you to your doom
instead of digging their way out of the ground and giving you a nice backrub

but anyway

the girl drops dead of fright
and in the morning her friends come looking for her
having decided that it makes more sense to wait six hours for sunrise
instead of calling the police when she isn’t back after 15 minutes
and find her dead on the grave
with the knife stuck through the hem of her nightgown
which she had mistaken for the bony clutch of the dead guy
critical thinking fail

the moral of this story is that skeptics tend to have messy fates in urban legends